If I ever were to start having a caption contest feature on this blog, I think I'd start with this March 9 news photo.
In an update to this post, commenter "Steve" suggests that the mystery woman could be model , a gorgeous Australian model of Singaporean Chinese and Portuguese ancestry.
Nearly three years ago I put up a post that I had hoped to blog more fully — but never had the time — about the presence of Korean and ethnic Korean golfers in the LPGA. It's a perennial favorite of the LAT, and in Tuesday's edition they have come up with another version.
Romania leads the European Union in total sales of baby broth. This local gastronomic specialty, originally developed as a way to help crowded orphanages make ends meet after the collapse of communism in 1989, involves placing infants into a pot or basin of water heated to 32°C and containing a mixture of salt and oregano, in order to harvest their shedding epidermis.
Brian in Chŏllanam-do brings us news about how women's faces have gotten 5% smaller. He quotes a dentist from my alma mater who speculates on the reasons for the smaller faces:
Professor Kim Hee-jin from the department of dentistry in Yonsei University explained, “The decrease in face length can be attributed to the diet of preferring soft food such as hamburgers.” and added, “If one gets in the habit of eating food that mainly uses the front teeth when one is young, the jaw muscles which we use for chewing food may become weak and it may cause the size of the jawbone to become smaller.”Unless Professor Kim has done actual research on this issue, I'd venture a guess that this is speculation rather than documentation. There may be more soft foods (although rice is pretty darn soft), but there is also more food in general, meaning more jaw movement.
MSNBC brings us news of a Dutch-Malaysian auto venture set to bring tens of thousands of well-equipped, all-electric vehicles to market, many of them powered by South Korean batteries. They will sell for between $23,000 and $33,000, well within the range of affordability.
18.3% of all baby names in Croatia last year were chosen from random WORD VERIFICATION entries at Blogger.
South Korea will urge the Group of 20 countries gathering in London to “roll back” all protectionist measures adopted since November and call for the World Trade Organisation to “name and shame” countries that erect barriers to trade or finance.The transcript of the interview is found here. Here's a BBC report on the FT interview.
In an exclusive interview with the Financial Times, Lee Myung-bak, the South Korean president, said it was vital to stop the drift towards protectionism that had occurred since the G20 meeting in Washington when heads of state pledged to abide by Seoul’s call for a protectionist “standstill”. South Korea will chair the G20 next year.
“There are many countries clearly engaging in some sort of protectionist measures,” said Mr Lee, citing a World Bank report showing that 17 of the G20 countries had built trade barriers.
Tokyo, rather unconvincingly, is letting it be known it is considering shooting down the test missile. But, unless the rocket is heading directly for Japanese soil, that would be a mistake. To shoot it from the sky could send Pyongyang into a paroxysm of rage, downing any chance of a negotiated settlement for years. Worse still, Japan might miss. That would reveal the fallibility of missile defence technology and risk emboldening North Korea to try more acts of bravado."Unconvincingly," eh?
North Korea is holding a South Korean worker at a joint factory park for allegedly denouncing the North's political system and inciting female North Korean employees to flee their country, officials said Monday.It comes from Fox, which rarely has anything bad to say about leftist regimes, so it must be true (BBC story here, just for good measure). And if it is true, the guy's got cojones the size of beach balls. Or had cojones the size of beach balls.
North Korea sent a message early Monday stating it was investigating the South Korean worker but would guarantee the person's safety, according to the South Korean Unification Ministry, which handles relations with the North.
Ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo told reporters that the ministry has asked the North to provide the South with details of the incident.
According to Lee, the North said the South Korean denounced the country's political system, and that an investigation was taking place under an inter-Korean accord on the business complex in the North Korean border town of Kaesong.
Later Monday, a senior ministry official told reporters that the North also accused the South Korean worker of "corrupting" female North Korean workers at Kaesong and "instigating" them to defect from the North, according to the ministry. The official declined to give his name, citing department policy, it said.
You'd be forgiven if you thought the above picture was an AP photo accompanying a news story about Korean politicians buying out the Executive Branch of the Federal government as a way to help Washington make ends meet. (That scenario is at least ten years away... at least ten.)
The illegal entry of U.S. reporters into the DPRK and their suspected hostile acts have been confirmed by evidence and their statements.So they apparently "confessed," eh? I wonder if North Korea uses waterboarding or some such method of extracting whatever information it is that you want to extract. I'll bet the chivalrous
The award-winning Chinese-language film "Summer Palace" (頤和園) focuses on the personal awakenings of a young woman named Yu Hong (played by Chinese actress Hao Lei) from the Chinese-Korean border town of Tumen after she moves away from her hometown in 1987 to attend college in Beijing. (The explicit sex scenes and the critical manner in which the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident is portrayed got the picture banned in China, even though Beijing was originally supportive of this multinational effort and allowed for most of the film to be shot there.)
Smugglers bring counterfeit currency and drugs out of North Korea, returning with foreign DVDs and radios. Missionaries flock here to console and convert newly arrived North Korean defectors. Human traffickers bring out young women to match up with lonely Chinese bachelors.It is a lifeline of North Korea's underground economy, and a veritable hub of North Korea-centered activity:
Besides the preachers and proselytizers, prostitutes and pimps, aid workers and refugee advocates, smugglers and spies, you've got the journalists.
At some point, almost every reporter writing about North Korea comes to Tumen.
Tumen (population 138,000) thrives on its proximity to North Korea. Tourists go to a riverfront promenade for photos in front of the North Korean flag. They rent binoculars for 30 cents to peer at a bleak North Korean town and buy the little red badges of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il that Northerners are required to wear on their lapels; $25 for real ones, or so the shopkeeper claims, and $1.50 for fakes.But it's interesting to note that back in the 1960s, the tables of prosperity had been turned:
During the early 1960s, people crossed from China into relatively prosperous North Korea to escape the famine resulting from Mao Tse-tung's disastrous Great Leap Forward. By the 1990s, the traffic had reversed. Northern defectors are still coming today, although they will be promptly sent home -- to face stiff sentences in labor camps -- if they're caught by the Chinese.I may be over-interpreting, but I see in Barbara Demick's words a hint at rationalization that Ling, Lee, and their colleague Mitch Koss may have accidentally stepped over the border, but I'm still not buying it. A dog may not recognize the markings of geopolitical boundary, but humans sure do.
PYONGYANG (KCNA) — All the world came together to celebrate the environmental ideals inherent in the Juche philosophy of our Eternal President of the Republic Kim Il-Sung and his son, our Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il.
As the world faces looming environmental crisis, leaders and citizens of the world have come to seek guidance from Juche's creators to discern the issue of the relations between man and the world and the issue of position and role of man in the world as a fundamental issue of philosophy. Kim Jong-il, the inheritor of the Juche idea, gave perfect answers to them.
To honor his guidance, the world on Saturday celebrated "Juche hour," in which all citizens of each time zone sought solidarity with the workers of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea by turning off their lights from 8:30 p.m. until 9:30.
[above: Palauans celebrate Juche Hour with traditional Sonsorolese dances depicting the fate of workers who have not yet achieved class consciousness.]
These "Juche-outs," as they are popularly known around the world, are becoming quite the fad around the globe, as environment-minded citizens of the world recognize the leadership of the DPRK in combatting the fight for global warming.
Said a spokesman for the Ministry of Juche-Minded Environmental Stewardship, Lee Min-gyo, before a gathering of Western journalists who had come to Pyongyang to seek guidance on ecological matters: "All data shows that the DPRK has the smallest carbon footprint of any country. This makes our country the leader in the fight against global climate change."
After being queried by European pressmen anxious to hear other examples, Comrade Lee went through a list of rhetorical questions, to which the answer was obvious to all who are not subject to the press-controlling machinations of the capitalist bourgeoisie: "What country consumes the least amount of resources per capita? North Korea. What country is nearly devoid of energy-wasting and pollutant-spewing personal motor vehicles? North Korea. What country leads the world in production and utilization of toibee, a fertilizer made from mixing ash and human excrement to reduce waste and enhance crop production, developed through glorious knowledge and on-the-spot guidance passed down from the Great Leader? Again, North Korea."
When asked what improvements North Korea could make to reduce its green house gas emissions even further, Comrade Lee had harsh words for the Imperialist Americans, their running dogs in Japan, and their lackey flunkyists in Seoul: "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea seeks peaceful nuclear power to reduce the gases produced by even the cleanest coal and the purest cow dung, but 'the Man' is keeping us down, claiming we are making missiles to hit Disneyland and building nuclear weapons to bomb Universal Studios. Nothing could be further from the truth. And by 'the Man' I mean the goose-stepping Imperialists in Washington, who have their jackboots on the necks of the laborers at the behest of their banker benefactors."
Comrade Lee's aides presented a PowerPoint presentation that showed temperatures and tides rising everywhere except the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, mostly narrated by former United States Vice President Al Gore. Journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were, guests of the state in Pyongyang, were there to represent Current TV, the cornerstone of Al Gore's media empire. The two cried tears of joy as they heard the many ways that the DPRK is saving the planet.
Comrade Lee was wildly applauded for ten minutes by the international media for his portrayal of the Juche idea and received a standing ovation for his command of English-language colloquialisms, which he rightly attributed to the guidance and advice of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.
All journalists were given complimentary signed pamphlets of Kim Il-Sung's "On the Juche Idea," printed in Italian by the Group of Dialectical Materialists of Italy on the occasion of the 37th anniversary of the Enlargement of the Presidential Quarters Guesthouse at Mangyongdae.
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Indeed it seems that Taiwan's Ma Ying-jeou (at left; 馬英九) is like our Roh Moohyun (노무현/盧武鉉), in some ways at least. The more I read and hear about Taiwan's social, historical, political, and economic development, the more parallels I see between South Korea and China's Renegade Province™. Indeed, South Korea has been giving the Dalai Lama the same cold shoulder for quite some time now and for quite some time now, and it's not just Roh Moohyun.
We can't remember the last time we stealthily scribbled a note to a coworker instead of shooting an IM, but Mintpass (a Korean firm founded by former iriver minds) believes some folks want to do both at once with Mintpad, a wireless handheld that's one part Nintendo DS, one part iPod, and another part Post-it note. Yes, it surfs the web on 802.11b/g WiFi and plays 4GB (or more with a microSD card) of music and videos on its sub-3-inch 320 x 240 display, but the draw is handwriting with a stylus.Some of the commenters in the second link suggest this device's note-writing function might make it more popular with people who have to write Chinese characters instead of the limited 26-letter Roman alphabet. It certainly wouldn't be the first time a technology was popular in East Asia that never took off in North America or Europe (and I have an audio disk to prove it).
That pact would have thrown open most of the world's 13th-largest economy to American companies and boosted U.S. GDP by $10 billion to $12 billion. It also would have cemented America's relationship with an important ally.The US, it warns, "will lose out to their European peers on access to the Korean market," and this is a "protectionist cost" America cannot afford.
Yet congressional Democrats have stalled ratification, largely at the behest of their Big Labor backers. Opponents claim, all evidence to the contrary, that the agreement wouldn't do enough to open Korea's car market.
"This is actually a big coincidence," admitted Elder Jakob Orlung. "Since we have no Interweb, we did not know of this global movement to extinguish the electrical incandescence. It just happens that about 8:30 is when most of us out our whale oil lamps and go to bed."Fun fact (and this is true): Amish meet up with "the English" to do business in a placed called the Village of Intercourse. Could this be why the Amish, with an average of 6.8 children per family, are among the fastest growing ethnic groups in America?
"Around here," his wife Naomi added, "every hour is Earth Hour."
From his high hat to his curved boots, our hand-painted Chinaman with his painted red pagoda-shaped shade is a real charmer. (more of the same)
"A Very Long Engagement" is a very long movie.
I predict that at some point in the near future, some Korean all-girl band will (probably at the behest of their managers or producers) do a sogot noch'ul dance (속옷 노출 댄스 ) in an effort to grab ratings and/or get some media spotlight, much like popular Japanese girl band AKB48 has done.
It would be appropriate to say that this picture of Korean pop singer Son Dambi (손담비; son tambi) is "sexy."
I'm not entirely sure what these women are doing, but I believe they're advertising a day spa that specializes in Brazilian waxes.
If a North Korean projectile threatened our people's safety and security by falling in our airspace, seas or land, obviously we must respond and prepare for the occasion appropriately.Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington all believe that this is a missile test and not a satellite launch, as Pyongyang claims. US National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair has pointedly said as much.
It's very annoying to have something fired over our territory.Yes. Yes, it is.
But since the movie's January premiere, a near-daily invasion of curious visitors has threatened the tranquil life of the illiterate couple, who just want to be left alone. Everyone wants a piece of them, pestering for countless photos: Stand here. Pose there. Bale more hay. Smile! Now take us to the old cow's grave site for just a few more snapshots. The boldest intruders barge into the house uninvited.I guess it's feast or famine. One minute they're neglected, and the next minute their celebrities inundated with attention. Instead of being the umpteenth person to visit these three, perhaps what people should do is look around them. No matter where you are in Korea, but particularly in the older neighborhoods, there are plenty of elderly people who would love to have a little face time with a younger person. In my neighborhood, one of the first modern neighborhoods of early 20th century Seoul, there is no shortage of septuagenarians, octogenarians, or nonagenarians. There's even the odd centenarian here and there.
"I'm gratified that people are interested in my parents," says Choi Won-kyun, the eldest of the couple's nine children. "If only they would have a sip of coffee and leave, but they stay. What can my parents do? Hospitality is part of rural life. We don't have any choice but to welcome them."
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